Welcome to FOLIO!Happy testing!

As you follow these steps, please feel free to modify this page as needed. Thanks!

FOLIO On-boarding (for testers)

The following collaboration tools are the most important when engaging in the FOLIO project as a tester:

FOLIO Slack channels for real-time chat are available at folio-project.slack.com. Request to join the FOLIO Slack channels here. Use Slack as your primary means of communicating with other testers and developers. There is a private testing channel. Please contact Cate Boerema to join.

FOLIO uses JIRA at issues.folio.org for tracking FOLIO tasks and bugs. The account you set in JIRA is the same account you will use in Confluence (our wiki). Once you've signed up, contact Cate Boerema to make sure you have the appropriate permissions.

Types of testing

Depending upon their interests and skills, FOLIO testers can support the project with automated or manual testing.

Manual testing - There are several types of manual testing options:

Story reviews - Review completed user stories and bug reports in JIRA to verify that stated requirements are met. Focus is on identifying failed requirements.

Exploratory testing - Test in an unscripted manner to exercise various use cases and report defects found along the way. Focus is on uncovering defects (performance, functional etc). Because FOLIO is a work in progress, it can be challenging to differentiate between a defect and an incomplete feature. For this reason, exploratory testing should be conducted with a good sense of context (e.g. what features are relatively complete, what problems are known issues etc) and issues filed from exploratory testing should be reviewed by a PO or Dev Lead before being passed on to development.

Usability testing - Participate in guided test with usability tester. Goal is to determine if the FOLIO user interface (or UI options) are easy to use and understand. FOLIO's UX team will periodically call for volunteers for this type of testing.

User acceptance testing - Test FOLIO features to verify they will work for the user in regards to a specific set of goals or scenarios. The last step in software testings, UAT is conducted by SMEs (in this case from FOLIO SIGs) on features that have already undergone thorough functional testing. Focus is on surfacing features that may have been misunderstood, overlooked, miscommunicated and so on.